• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 16021 0

gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his plate: gristle: no teeth to chew it. Chump chop he has. Sad booser’s eyes.’ Subsequent revisions and additions changed and augmented the text, with letters B, C, and D indicating, respectively, Joyce’s revisions to the lost final working draft as indicated by the typed text on the extant typescript, the first round of revisions to the typescript, and the second round of typescript revisions. (Letters in parentheses indicate reconstructed text on documents that have not survived.) The numbers indicate the revisions on each subsequent setting in proof. Full brackets show Joyce’s deletions or changes, as in the revision of the manuscript’s ‘spooned’ to ‘shovelled’ in the second round of typescript revisions (l.15). Carets indicate additions within a single stage, such as Joyce’s addition of ‘infant’s’ between ‘a’ and ‘napkin’ on the manuscript (ll. 14-15) or of ‘Something galoptious.’ as an addition-to-an-addition on the first set of proofs (l.23). When combined with angle brackets, carets show a revision, as when Joyce revised ‘chewing’ to ‘wolfing’ on the manuscript itself (ll. 11-12). The synoptic presentation of the continuous manuscript text is thus an assemblage of inclusion: Joyce’s deleted and superseded readings, as well as those that remain in Ulysses, are all part of it.

The superscript circles in the synopsis point to the footnotes (not reproduced here), where the editor has recorded his editorial emendations to the continuous manuscript text. For example, at l. 14, he emended the manuscript’s ‘a’ to ‘an’ preceding ‘infant’s napkin’ on the basis of his conjecture of Joyce’s activity on the lost final working draft, the text on the surviving typescript providing the evidence. The edited text differs from all earlier editions of Ulysses in one place: the word ‘gums,’ with the subsequent colon (l. 17 of the synopsis and l. 660 of the reading text), is restored to the text for the first time here.

The presence or absence of ‘gums’ might seem like a minor matter, but it is indicative of all the decisions involved in editing Ulysses. The editor admitted the word into the continuous manuscript text, and it became part of the edited text, on the basis of its appearance in the serialized version of ‘Lestrygonians’ in the Little Review; he argues that its appearance there is evidence that Joyce added the word onto a lost typescript page. The word’s appearance here is consistent with Gabler’s procedures. In a review of the edition, Jerome J. McGann made the important observation that ‘gums’ is correct here but that an edition that follows other principles would be equally correct without the word. This word can stand for the many that appear in Gabler’s edition, often for the first time in printed versions of Ulysses, because of his editorial principles and the consistent application of the procedures that follow from those principles.

Several examples can indicate how the editor arrived at particular readings and also how other editions might read differently. First, on the opening page of this edition, Buck Mulligan calls ‘out’ to Stephen (l. 6) and blesses the ‘land’ (l. 10), whereas in earlier editions he called ‘up’ and blessed the ‘country.’ In both cases, the editor follows the Rosenbach Manuscript (which here was the typist’s copy) and reasons from a bibliographic analysis of the transmission text that the typed ‘up’ and ‘country’ were unauthorized departures from Joyce’s text. In the first case, he additionally surmises that the typist was looking ahead to ‘Come up, Kinch!’ in the following line. Likewise, in this edition the telegram that Stephen Dedalus recalls in ‘Proteus’ reads, ‘Nother dying come home father.’ (3.199), whereas earlier editions show the first word as ‘Mother,’ more correct but failing to image the curiosity of the telegram’s orthographic error. The editor follows Joyce’s inscription of ‘Nother’ on the Rosenbach Manuscript (again the typist’s copy), which Joyce insists on once more in his revisions to the first set of proofs, and